American citizen from Orange County sentenced to 12 years in Vietnam

A Vietnamese American man from Orange County was sentenced to 12 years in prison after a court found him guilty of “attempting to overthrow the state,” Reuters and other news agencies reported Monday.

Michael Nguyen, 55, pleaded guilty at his trial – which lasted about four hours – and asked that his sentence be reduced so he could reunite with his family, attorney Nguyen Van Mieng told Reuters.

Nguyen, whose full name is Michael Phuong Minh Nguyen, will be deported after he serves his sentence,

His wife, Helen Nguyen, called the sentence “a slap to the United States.”

“No matter how much I reached out to the United States government and Congress, the Vietnamese government is saying ‘What are you going to do about it?’” said Helen Nguyen, who learned of the sentence from social media early Monday, after midnight.

Her youngest child, one of the couple’s four daughters, was awake when her mother learned the news. “All she did was cry out, ‘why, why, why.’”

RELATED: Sham trial awaits American citizen from Orange County in Vietnam

Nguyen, an American citizen who lives in Orange, was arrested July 7, 2018, pulled off a bus with three other people in the city of Da Nang. His family said he was there to visit relatives and friends and denied he was involved with any political activities.  Nguyen had the support of more than two dozen members of Congress, and Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, sought to draw more attention to the case when she invited Helen Nguyen as her guest to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address last February.

The government investigated Michael Nguyen for violating Article 109 of the criminal code, for activities to overthrow the government, but kept him imprisoned without official charges or allowing him to see family members or contact his own attorney.

Two others arrested with him, Huyn Duc Thanh Binh, 23, and Tran Long Phi, 21, were sentenced for the same offense to 10 and eight years, respectively, according to the Tuoi Tre newspaper in Vietnam.  They face three years of house arrests after their jail terms, Mieng told Reuters.  (Mieng represented Binh, Helen Nguyen said.) A fourth defendant, Binh’s father, was sentenced to one year of imprisonment for failing to report the others.

The American citizen and other defendants had a plan to “incite 100 people to join a protest accompanied by a staged traffic jam, to buy weapons to resist government agencies, and to prepare foods and shelters for their long-term fights,” according to an indictment, the Vietnamese newspaper reported.

Michael Nguyen allegedly confessed that he first arrived in Vietnam in 2004 to meet with an activist to create an organization that would occupy public offices in Vietnamese cities.  The defendants founded groups that prepared leaflets, created Molotov cocktails and slingshots to attack police and government buildings, looking to topple the Vietnamese government, the Tuoi Tre paper reported. The defendants, along with others “used Facebook and email accounts to discuss Vietnam’s social and political affairs with some people in foreign countries,” the newspaper wrote.

Vietnam, already antsy over political dissent, has cracked down on bloggers and other social media users in recent years via a new cyber-security law which critics say the communist country uses to suppress dissent online. Amnesty International, an international human rights organization, has identified 128 people prisoners of conscience in Vietnam, but Michael Nguyen is not among them.

Those familiar with the Vietnamese legal system say trials against political dissidents or those suspected of political dissent are subjected to sham trials, with little transparency, fake confessions and likely verdict of guilty.

This story is developing. Please check back later for more.